Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Light Up My Life

One of the reasons why I want to plant fruits and vegetables in the garden is so the kids know where their food comes from and appreciate the effort it takes to get it from seed to their table. When I heard there was going to be an olive oil demonstration I thought it would take those efforts one more step in that life lesson. The gentleman asked different kids to come up and help with each step of the process. A whole basket of fresh black olives, about 2 pints, were poured into the hopper. The top of the press was put into place then all of the turning and cranking started. After lots of twist and turns, liquid stared to pour out of the bottom. The juices were then poured into test tubes and put into a machine to spin out the oil. After a few minutes there was olive juice and a table spoon of olive oil. Yup all of those olives for only drops of oil. The oil was poured into a lamp and lit to show it was really oil and would burn

It is something to think about. The amount of effort to make olive oil is one of the reason why whaling for blubber became such a commercial success. The whaling industry killed thousands of whales to fuel the lamps of Europe and elsewhere. Whaling waned only when fossil fuels replaced it. If we want to replace fossil fuels we’ll need to find something to replace it. We changed the balance of the sea and now we are changing more ecosystems for cheap fuel.